In a research note, analyst Alkesh Shah argued that Solana's value lies in how it can handle thousands of transactions per second.
Solana has the potential to become "the Visa of crypto," according to Bank of America.
In a research note, analyst Alkesh Shah argued that Solana's value lies in how it can handle thousands of transactions per second — with real-time data from the project stating that each transaction commands fees of $0.00025. He wrote:
"Its ability to provide high throughput, low cost and ease of use creates a blockchain optimized for consumer use cases like micropayments, DeFi, NFTs, decentralized networks (Web3) and gaming."
Looking ahead, Shah believes that Solana has the potential to meaningfully eat into Ether's market share — and CoinMarketCap data suggests ETH dominance currently stands at 19.2%.
This has the potential to translate into a big boost for SOL's price, considering that its market cap of $47 billion is far below ETH's $398 billion valuation. Shah went on to write:
"Ethereum prioritizes decentralization and security, but at the expense of scalability, which has led to periods of network congestion and transaction fees that are occasionally larger than the value of the transaction being sent."
That isn't to say that Solana is without its problems, as Shah adds:
"Solana prioritizes scalability, but a relatively less decentralized and secure blockchain has tradeoffs, illustrated by several network performance issues since inception."
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Teething Troubles
Back in September, a high-profile outage caused Solana to be down for almost 18 hours — and a distributed denial of service attack in December caused transactions per second to tumble substantially.
A number of developers building on Solana have expressed exasperation by the disruption as traders "lose a lot of confidence when the nodes go down."
